I don't know why we are all waiting for Detroit to bring us more environmentally friendly transportation. It looks as if several graduate students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have the matter well in hand.
The students, who are master's or Ph.D. candidates in architecture, urban studies and the Smart Cities project at MIT's Media Lab program, have designed an electric, two-passenger car with America's biggest cities in mind. Ho-hum you say? There's more: These City Cars can be folded and stacked together like so many grocery carts, packing eight cars into a curb spot that might accommodate only one Hummer on any other day. (You can see a picture of it here.) And just like a grocery cart, you would take the first one in the stack, use it, and then return it to another stack. There is a lot of smart technology in these cars, like wheel robots that make it possible to do away with traditional, energy-hogging drive-train elements like engine blocks, gear boxes and differentials.
City Cars have, like doctoral degrees, been a long time in coming. The first mention of the project on MIT's Web site goes back to 2004. But apparently a prototype, which is being produced in conjunction with General Motors (which sponsors the Media Lab), is now due out next spring.
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